


Easy to Keep

by Barkour



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Cunnilingus, F/M, Future Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-16
Updated: 2013-12-16
Packaged: 2018-01-04 19:02:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1084601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Barkour/pseuds/Barkour
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Happiness is a worrisome thing to Loki.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Easy to Keep

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



> This story contains spoilers for _Thor 2: The Dark World_.
> 
> I hope you've had a lovely December, that you've had warmth and laughter and the company of people you care for deeply (and whom care for you deeply), and a joyful 2014 ahead of you. :)

Sif dressed efficiently in the dark hours of morning, well before the sun began to stir. From the relative warmth of the bed, Loki watched her hands work. A thin cotton cloth laced at her waist and padded leather breeches on top, then a thicker cotton smock over which she pulled on her leather under armor. Her shoulders flexed as she shrugged the leather over them, a movement that rippled down her back, half-hidden by the folds of the smock. The leather stays swung at her side.

“Would you care for another pair of hands to help you with those laces?”

She looked over her shoulder at him. A smile perched delicately in the arching angle of her brow.

“I’ve no need for a lady’s maid.”

He slung his legs over the edge of the bed. The stone tiles were cold against his feet, but he hadn’t minded the cold for many years.

“I wasn’t thinking of maids.”

“Or maidens?” she suggested.

Loki padded across the floor to her. If she was half-dressed, and hardly that, then he was bare, as bare as she’d left him when she rolled away from his arms. Sif gathered her hair up in her hands and tucked it over her shoulder, on the far side from the unclosed joint of her leather vest.

“I see no maidens,” he said. He began tugging on the stays, drawing the cords tight. His reward came in Sif’s little indrawn breath, the minute hitching of her breasts. Perhaps that was ungentlemanly of him to look down over her shoulder like so, but then an hour ago she’d been on top of him and those fine, small breasts shivering with each hard roll of her hips.

“Well enough,” said Sif. “I should hate to foul their ears.”

He laughed softly and moved down the column, pulling as he went. The leather sealed down her ribs. He’d tried once to count them, but she’d muscle there, muscle thick enough to mask the line of each bone from his fingers and tongue.

“And what foul thing would you say to them?” Loki tied a neat knot at the bottom, a firm one that would hold. His hands lingered at her waist. With one hand he palmed the padded swell of her hip.

“It’s not my tongue I fear,” she said, letting her hair go, “but yours.”

Her hair, loosed, dark and tangled, was a cloud before him; it smelled of sweat, her sweat and his. She hadn’t washed. Loki, cradling her hip, bent and pressed his nose to her nape through her hair.

“What has the lady Sif to fear from my tongue?”

“Nothing,” said Sif, “but what lie will come out next.”

She turned in his arms. Her eyes were dark as night and her smile as bright as a blade. So few, those smiles: he tucked it away. Too, he tucked a length of hair behind her ear, and as he did so he traced the soft shell of her ear, how the ridge in it wound, though it was her hair he wanted to wind about his finger.

“When have I ever lied to you?”

“When have you ever not?”

“A tricky question,” said Loki. “I would hate to answer too quickly.”

Cloaked in the early morning blackness, Sif was rendered particularly striking, striking not in beauty but as in a small knife slipped gently between the ribs. To hold Sif was like to holding a thing with many edges, and if his fingers should tighten over much then she would make him bleed not out of a desire to hurt him but simply because she could not be held so closely. Once she had told him he was like a fish, slippery and impossible to catch with your hands. “A fish?” he’d said. “How flattering,” and Loki had reminded her he knew very well how to catch fish with just his fingers. Just his fingers, she’d said, and an enchantment to call them to his hands and still their struggles. He’d no such enchantments for Sif.

“Tell me your thoughts,” she said. “You’ve been quiet too long. I don’t trust your silences.”

He drew his finger down her jaw and said, “I’m thinking I should not have wasted my time doing up your stays.”

She withdrew at this, her hand at his chest to push him off.

“You won’t have me out of them. You may be pleased to lay about, but I’ve duties today.”

“Honorable Sif,” he said, taking up her hand in his. He kissed her knuckles, lingering at each, as he had wished to kiss her nape, following each knob of her spine down to the small of her back where he might spread her legs and continue his ministrations with lips and teeth and tongue. Then, in the dark, he let her go.

“If you should have a change of heart,” he said. He knew she wouldn’t.

Sif dressed, strapping on her chest plate and fetching her shield and her glaive from their places on the wall. She kissed him again before she left, a firm touch that stayed warm on his lips for some minutes after she’d left, gone to see to her heroics. Slowly the shadowed morning gave way to light, as the sun began its daily trek from one horizon to the other. Loki drummed his fingers against his belly and considered the brightening of the walls, and then he too dressed. He’d work of his own, though perhaps less noble than Sif’s, and without Sif, the bed was also without charm. He flicked his fingers through his hair, brushed his collar straight, and took his leave of the empty room.

*

Doing good when no one wanted you around in the first place was difficult; he hadn’t need to apply to Sif’s workplace to solve that riddle. Instead Loki took to sticking too large a tip into the barista’s jar and occasionally setting a fleeting curse on someone who had kicked a dog and all the other little things he supposed were beneath the notice of the Avengers. He didn’t like to think he was bored, as even Loki knew his boredom often led to trouble, but there was only so much he could do without running up against someone’s authority, if he hadn’t already done so.

“You could help with the Avengers,” Sif suggested. She’d been sitting with her shirt off in front of him as he tended to her small hurts of the day. “I would vouch for you, if you spoke with them.”

He snorted indelicately. “And would they listen to the word of the woman who shares my bed?”

“You share my bed,” she reminded him, “not the other way around. And I haven’t tried to cut your tongue out. Surely that’s recommendation enough.”

“My lady Sif,” he’d said as he bent to kiss her bruised shoulder, “you are ever gracious.”

At the coffee shop he stuffed a twenty dollar bill into the jar and waited for the barista to finish his order. Something sweet today, he’d thought as he stepped out of the _between realms_ and into the alley that opened up next to the shop. Peppermint and gingerbread were very much en vogue this season, some cultural thing that had the months before seen the prevalence of pumpkin-flavored everything. He’d joked that he was sure he’d see pumpkin-topped pizza soon, and Sif, something of a convert, had gone eerily wistful. Next year, he thought, he would have to buy those scented candles and stick them under her pillow just for the look she’d give him.

The prospect of another year was like a pin in his toe. His gut tightened, cinched like a length of thread around a spool. Next year. He glanced at the television set above the bar and found little relief: the news was covering the Avengers’ latest mission somewhere in the sprawling, flat farmland of the Midwest. The elegant, sparse lines of Sif’s shoulders and throat and jaw as she turned to smile at the camera—her eyes teasing, her smile smug, her shoulders so very strong— He blinked once and turned from the television.

“Frozen cappuccino with double espresso and an extra shot of milk.”

“Yes, thank you.” Loki came forward, easily catching the cup as the barista let go. She’d written _Look_ on the brim rather than _Luke_. He'd overestimated the need for a pseudonym.

“I should have a secret identity,” Loki had said to Sif one evening, out on the roof as it snowed all around them. He’d expanded their apartment with magic, shaping extra rooms and luxuries out of the nebulous fabric of the between realms space, but it was after all still mostly in Manhattan. “That seems to be popular on Midgard. I could be a dashing reporter. Or a lawyer. That might be a better fit.”

Sif caught snowflakes on her fingertips. They melted there, as they never melted on Loki’s cheeks. The stink that stuck to all Midgard’s cities—the collected refuse, the smoke, the sweat of so many people so closely gathered—was lighter somehow with the cleanness of snow. 

“I don’t have a secret identity,” she countered lightly. Her cheeks were flushed with cold and her breath a soft fog spilling from between her dark lips.

“Oh, you should have one. All the heroes do.”

Sif lowered her hands, and Loki, after a moment, reached to take them in his own hands and bring her fingers to his mouth. He breathed summer off his tongue, through the spaces between his teeth.

“My name is my own,” said Sif. “I wouldn’t—I won’t—take another name and hide behind it, as if I’m afraid.”

He kissed her rough knuckles. Fine scars creased them, where she’d taken hard raps and blows from practice swords and real ones too, all through their long and uneasy adolescence. He’d no scars of his own on his hands but for the ones he’d been born with or given as an infant, the dark ones in blue skin that he hadn’t yet the courage to map.

“I know that you fought for your name, Sif,” he said. “But perhaps this once subterfuge would be better than roaring out at the heavens. For myself, I mean. Not everyone,” he said to her knuckles as he kissed them again, “has forgiven Loki like you have.”

She’d turned her hands in his grip, so that he let her go, and she reached to cradle his face. There was tenderness in that, but steel, too, and he was finding it easiest just to let Sif take him by the hand or the cheek. Her lips were chilly and dry on his cheek, but her breath was warm where it curled over his jaw.

“You haven’t given them a reason yet,” she said. She’d kissed the corner of his jaw in that patient way she had, the patience afforded someone who had confidence, if not in the future then in their self. Loki had moved beneath her so that she had to hold him by the shoulders; she had to hold him to her. Her tongue was sweet and hot and he’d dragged his teeth over the tip of it. He hadn’t closed his eyes. He’d wanted to see how her eyelashes dropped, how easily she kissed him. He’d wanted that confidence for his self.

Loki stayed a while in the coffee shop, watching the news as their dashing reporter, no Loki or Luke or _Look_ , interviewed Sif, Sif with her ready wolf’s smile and her knowing eyes. So simple, Sif, and yet so strange to him, too. A commercial break began. Loki sipped at his frozen drink. He found he was missing the taste of pumpkin in everything.

Next year, he thought.

*

“You know that you may visit,” said Thor.

They walked together, Loki and Thor, along the observation deck set high in Stark Tower, open to the sky and closed off with tall lattice railing. Late winter had settled coldly on the city New York, and here, near to the clouds, the air was like ice, clean and very sharp in the nose. Loki ran his hand lightly along the railing as he studied the skyline. A grey place, Midgard, all steel and concrete and dirt; it held none of Asgard’s beauty. Dots moved far below in great quantities: persons running or walking or riding from one place to another in a constant stream.

Loki asked another question.

“How does your queen fare?”

That was the easiest way to get a smile out of Thor. His whole face creased with it.

“Jane is well, and happy to be home again. She’s clever and she would be happy wherever she is so long as she has something to learn, but she does miss Earth, and her companions here.”

The sun hid behind a cloud, and the wind turned in its course. Loki leaned back against the railing and wished he’d thought to steal one of Sif’s ribbons; his hair would keep blowing into his eyes.

“In the ten years she’s ruled as queen,” said Loki, “Asgard has not become home?”

Thor settled back next to Loki. The wind teased his hair as well but Thor, who rode storms and foul winds as a matter of course, merely let it. His brow knit. In another time Loki would have jested that Thor ought not to think so hard; his brain needn’t bear the strain.

“Asgard is our home,” said Thor at last, “but you know how slowly Asgard changes. To some of the court, drinking of the sacred well is not enough.”

Loki’d enough of the wind blowing his hair about. He charmed a length of thread from his tailored suit jacket and made to tie his hair back. He advised, “Give them time, or make a lesson of them.”

Thor looked dryly at him. “And what would you do?”

“Banish them,” said Loki. “Or at least say you will if they won’t learn to show respect for their queen. Sometimes fear of a thing is all they need.”

“Fear never stopped you from doing what you wanted.”

“Nor you.”

Thor smiled, pleased. A snowstorm was coming up from the dark, wintry sea, sweeping toward land, and Loki’s brother turned his golden face up to the smell of the sea, seeking it even in the cold.

“Do you remember when we were children?”

“I remember much of it, yes,” said Thor. He’d closed his eyes, and the wind was brushing his small braids against his bearded cheek. “What of it wasn’t knocked out of my head.”

“Mother made us a glass menagerie,” Loki said. He was thinking of a little tiger that had been his favorite, its stripes cleverly rendered in fogged glass as opposed to the clearness of the rest of it.

“Mother made you a glass menagerie.” Thor glanced down at Loki. “She gave me a wooden sword with my name burned into the grip.”

Loki waved this off. “But you do remember it?”

“Of course,” said Thor. “How could I forget? You broke it and lied to mother when she asked what happened.”

“That isn’t precisely what happened,” Loki murmured, but it was close enough. 

The delicacy of the magic that had gone into the blowing and the shaping and the animating of each of the ten glass creatures had consumed him. He’d only wanted to know how they moved, and he’d thought perhaps if he puzzled it out on his own, Mother would be so pleased she’d teach him some of the tricks she said he wasn’t old enough yet to learn. But he hadn’t her patience or her understanding, and when he probed at the tiger, the little glass cat had convulsed and then burst like a bubble, wetly. The tiger had shone on his fingers.

“‘Some broken things can’t be fixed,’” Loki quoted.

A silence held between them for the span of a breath, another. Loki remembered how Frigga had shaken her head when he told her she could fix it. He thought his brother, too, was remembering their mother, though perhaps Thor at least did not have to think on how the last he’d reached for her hands, her hands hadn’t been there.

Thor turned from the storm.

“You will not return.”

They had spoken of this before. Rote, now, the offer and the rejection; still, Thor would ask.

“I’ve had enough of Asgard.” Loki spread his arms out and twisted on his heel, gesturing to encompass the horizon. “Midgard, now, this is a new thing.”

“Some of them won’t have forgotten you,” said Thor.

He let his arms drop. “Has Asgard forgotten?”

Thor smiled, without joy but without cruelty too, and he looked away from Loki. The chill got under Loki’s coat. Perhaps that was Odin, reaching out from Valhalla or Hel or wherever it was he’d wound up to remind Loki. He folded the coat more tightly about his chest.

“You still haven’t forgiven me,” said Loki. Not an accusation, but a truth.

Thor said, “You are my brother, Loki,” without allowance for debate.

“That’s more than I could ask for,” said Loki. He’d live with it. He lived with many things.

Frigga’s sons stayed a while at the top of the tower, till the snow started and Thor, shivering, made his excuses. Summer storms were meant for Thor, not snow and ice, and no ocean smell could tempt him to remain longer in the cold. Loki tipped his head back and let the snow drift across his face, as gently as any mother’s kiss.

*

Sif preferred the expediency of a shower to the luxury of a bath. Privately, Loki thought it silly as she’d grown with baths and not showers, but it was like Sif to parcel out or reserve a luxury for particular occasions. So when he walked in through the wall and slithered out of his coat, he was surprised to hear a splash in the bathroom. He tossed the coat—it hung itself in the closet, between the darker long coat and his fine herringbone vest and jacket—and investigated.

She’d filled the tub with bubbles, too. A luxury indeed. Loki rolled his sleeves up to his elbows and leaned against the door jamb, his legs crossed at an angle.

“Care for company?”

One graceful, muscled arm rose as a dream from the water, out of the froth, to gesture him forward. 

“Sit where you like.” 

Sif’s voice was low and thick, like cooled honey. The bubbles covered her breasts, and only the tops of her knees showed. Her long throat was slick and gleaming, and the ragged scar running diagonal across the side of it still showed pinkly. The whole of her hair was piled mountainously on top of her head.

He perched on the edge of the bathtub, tall and gleaming with its gold clawed feet. The room sweltered. A thin sweat threatened his nape. Her eyes were closed. She’d a trace of suds along the side of her nose; they showed white in her lashes.

Loki leaned across the bath to wipe the bubbles from her eyes. Her nose wrinkled and her lower lip pushed out at his touch, his hands, he thought, cold when she’d been soaking some while in such hot water, but she permitted him to draw his thumb down her nose.

“Should I ask how your day went?”

A smile warmed her mouth. “How new, you asking permission to speak.” Her eyelashes were incongruously delicate on her cheeks, her skin ruddy with the heat of the bath.

He stroked the back of his cool hand down her narrow cheek. Sif breathed deeply in; beneath the water, she was moving, slipping, unseen to him.

“You looked peaceful,” he said. Gently he touched the slickness of her throat. “I didn’t want to disturb you.”

She laughed. Her eyelashes rose, unveiling those hazel eyes of hers. As ever, he felt naked before her when she looked at him so. The water stirred; she sat up from the sloping back of the tub. The suds cradled her bosom.

“Ask me of my day,” she said.

So he asked her, and she told him. As she spoke, she slung her arms over her knees, and her spine curved. A hank of hair curled at her ear; he curled it around his finger, savoring the slide of it across his skin.

“How bloody,” he murmured once.

“As if you’ve not dealt worse,” said Sif. “And as it was, he bled little; the Torch Human burned him.”

Loki brushed the corner of her mouth. She’d taken on a frown. He waited, content for the moment to trace strange shapes on her heated skin with his thumb.

“Another controlled him. From a distance.”

“You didn’t know.”

“Not until the Phoenix felt his mind brush hers,” Sif said. “He was only a boy. He shouldn’t have died as he did.”

Loki cupped her face in both his hands. Perhaps if she’d been another woman her eyelashes would have fallen again; perhaps she would have taken the comfort he wanted to give her. This was Sif, though, and she met his gaze.

“You didn’t know,” he said again. “His death is not on your hands.”

Sif disagreed. “He died for my ignorance.”

“How were you to know?” Loki asked. “Are you reading my books in secret?”

The corner of her mouth flickered under his thumb. “I don’t have the stomach for it.”

She turned in the water. She came up, reaching for him. He took her kiss as she gave it to him, soft and fleeting.

“You would have known,” she said.

He smiled at his own expense. “I would have,” he said, “and that’s why your Avengers would never have me. Too much hands-on experience.”

She saw through him. She always had. Perhaps that was one of the reasons why he had ever sought her out. Few, those who cared enough to ferret out his truths from his lies; and he’d never been able to turn her away.

“Did you make any of them die for you?” Sif asked.

His heart beat calmly. Before he’d learned to lie to anyone else, Loki had learned to lie to himself. He’d made his amends. He’d apologized; he’d bowed; he’d scraped. He held her gaze as she held his gaze, steadily and without hesitation. He would that he’d Sif’s resolve, the certainty at the core of her.

Twelve years had gone by since he’d tried his hand at conquering worlds. To Midgard, twelve years was the length of childhood. For one such as they, twelve years was a breath let out. 

“No,” he said, and it was the truth. 

The other truth, the one he left unspoken, is that then, twelve years before, hateful in and blinded by his grief, he would not have cared if any of them had died. He supposed that was another thing with which he’d learned to live. Regicide, patricide, attempted genocide; it was a wonder no one had taken his head yet. 

Sif reached for him, and he wondered if she’d heard the thing he hadn’t said or seen it in his face, if it were possible for her to care for him as she seemed to; she’d pressed a blade to his throat once and promised to kill him, and he had believed her. Loki lied, but Sif only spoke truths. He would have deserved it, too. He might still have deserved it.

Then Sif drew him into the water, and the bubbles spilled out across the floor, and his elegant trousers were soaked through.

*

He hadn’t meant to take the shot for her. Rather, he hadn’t known what he was doing until he’d done it, and then he’d a hole in his chest and blood between his teeth.

Rough hands passed over his face. The sky shimmered over Sif’s shoulder. Something warm eased in his chest, or mayhaps that was simply his heart giving way. He’d laughed or tried to laugh, but he choked instead.

“Loki,” she called him, “Loki—”

If he could lift his hand he would have done so.

“Hello, Sif,” he said.

“Shut up,” she said. “Be still. You’re bleeding.” 

She bled, too, from a gash along her throat. He’d seen her head jerk, seen the blood spatter her chest plate, and then seen how the cannon took aim at her chest.

Blood spotted her face. Tears, too, and grime. Fear didn’t suit her. He’d always thought of her as she stood on a battlefield, her boot grinding some fool thing into the earth, her face fierce and remote, glaive driving downward.

“Better I than you,” he said. Death had waited over long for Loki.

“I said shut up,” she snapped, “or I’ll pull your tongue out of your head.”

He couldn’t laugh at that either. Her dark hair gleamed as a black halo. Blackness pressed at the corners of his vision. Once as an absurd adolescent, overcome with anguished passion, he had thought to himself he would gladly die in Sif’s hair.

“How poetic,” he murmured.

Cloth ripped; he heard it, distantly. Sif’s head was bent. Her cape was gone, her shoulders bared beneath her armor. He wanted to tell her not to waste something so grand as her cape, but he’d lost his tongue after all or use of it. The distinction meant little. He was dying.

Loki looked up at Sif. Her teeth were in her lower lip. She shifted him, tying her torn cape about his chest. The set of her jaw was grim; he envied whoever would see that look on her face last. 

Her hair brushed his lips. He closed his eyes. 

“You must not die,” she said from far away, so very far away. “You must stay with me. Loki. Loki—”

His name had ever been sweetest on her tongue. Loki was glad to hear it there at the end, in the mouth of Sif.

When he woke a week later in the healer’s bed, he woke to find Sif sleeping beside his bed, her hand on his hand, her head on his arm. A dream, he’d thought. He turned his hand, weakly, and then she’d roused and lifted her head and looked at him, and he’d known it wasn’t a dream.

“Loki,” she’d said, and a smile like the moon rising had come over her face, like something transcendent and luminescent shining out through her skin. She had never smiled at him like that, or if she had, she'd given up such things long ago.

He stopped running after that.

*

They ate together at a little café in Manhattan, Sif’s choice. She’d a fondness for pizza, well-cultivated over the last handful of years as she lived and worked with the Avengers in Thor’s stead, and she at least ate with gusto. The grease stained Loki’s fingers and his sleeve when it trailed across his plate. Sif passed the plates over and instead ate directly from the metal stand at the center of the table. Like a native, she folded each slice in half width-wise before eating it. Cheese dragged like connective tissue between her teeth and the slice of pizza in her hand.

She narrowed her eyes at Loki over the pizza. “What?”

He stirred and made a show of looking around the café. The woman who had brought them Sif’s extra-large thin crust pizza with everything on it was taking a photo of Sif, still in full armor, with her camera phone. Loki looked back at Sif over his shoulder. At least she’d taken her helmet off before eating. The winged thing barely fit the edge of the table. Sif’s legs barely fit her chair.

“Were you speaking to me?”

Sif bit through the cheese. “I don’t trust you when you look at me like that.” Like a bird of prey snapping down a sparrow’s wing, Sif ate the length of crust in two neat bites. Her teeth flashed. She sucked grease from her first finger.

“How am I looking at you?” he asked. “I can’t see my own face. Please, describe it, since I’m being questioned for it.”

She inclined her head towards the remainder of the pizza. “Aren’t you going to eat?”

“It’s very … greasy,” he hedged.

Sif laughed. Her eyes pinched with it. Sucking at her thumb, she said, “Are you watching your figure?” in a fashion he might have considered coy if Sif weren’t still laughing at him.

Loki smoothed his tie down his front. “It’s a fine figure.”

“Fine enough,” she agreed, “if you care for that.”

He reached carelessly for his glass of water and said, “Well, I should hope you care. It’s all for your sake, you know.” The water at least was serviceable: clean, cool, a bit crisp on the tongue. He took another sip and pretended not to notice Sif coughing into her hand.

“For _my_ sake?” she managed, her palm still at her chin. “Really? All those things you have in the closet, that’s for my sake and not your own?”

“I’d hate to embarrass you when we go out for lunch,” he said sleekly. He glanced purposefully around the café again, his lashes low. A little girl sitting in the corner with her family was pointing to Sif. He smiled at the little girl’s father and then at the serving woman and said to Sif, “You choose such fine establishments.” 

One or two parties had entered the cheap café after noticing Sif at the table near the window. No doubt the serving woman, who turned hastily away from Loki’s smile, had some part in that.

“You’re a peacock,” Sif declared, “and a snob, and I shouldn’t take you out anywhere at all if you’re just going to stick your nose up at everything.”

“I haven’t stuck my nose up at anything,” he said. “The décor is very homey. I like this checkered tablecloth. Is it plastic?” He fingered the edge of it and continued to smile blandly about the place. “Midgard does love its shortcuts.”

“And you don’t?” Sif was smiling, too, as if she knew something Loki didn’t. It was precisely the sort of thing that made him want to find out.

“I don’t believe in shortcuts. I’ve always taken the long route,” said Loki.

Her regard softened and, too, darkened. He looked down to his plate and the slice of pizza dripping, forgotten, from his hand. To the woman who served them pizza, and to everyone else in the café and strolling along the sidewalk outside, Loki appeared to be a short man with mottled skin and no hair. Some had forgot Loki’s face; not all cared to forget. He didn’t want to see what might be in Sif’s face.

Shyly, almost, Sif touched his wrist with the callused tips of her fingers. Shyly, if she weren’t Sif, who had never been shy and certainly not around Loki.

“Shake that shadow from your face,” she said.

He smiled at her. “What shadow?” 

Sif’s eyes were still dark. She was—not yearning, he thought, yearning was too gentle a word for Sif, nearly as wrong as shyly—but looking at him as over a great distance that she wanted to cross, that she wanted him to cross.

“You don’t have to suffer alone,” said Sif.

“I’m hardly alone,” he said. “In fact, I have a great deal of company.” That was the problem. He’d made very sure he wasn’t the only one hurt.

“Really?” Sif raised an eyebrow. “Is that why you sulk at home alone all day?”

He smiled falsely and said, “Not _all_ day,” and Sif looked knowingly at him again. Irritated, he ate two bites of his pizza slice. It had cooled in his hand and the cheese stuck to his tongue.

“I liked you better when you tried to knock my head off,” Loki said.

“I could try again, if you like,” Sif offered.

“Please,” said Loki. “Sif. We’re in public.”

She picked another slice up off the stand and brought it to her tongue. She’d all the effortless confidence of a true warrior, a woman who never allowed for defeat but fought for victory on her own terms.

“I know.”

Her jaw worked. She licked tomato sauce from her lips. Loki watched—really, he couldn’t help it—the long, tantalizing slide of her throat as she swallowed. Sif smirked at him again and then she bit her thumb.

Loki turned in his seat. He smiled winningly around the café; he tipped his head to the serving woman.

“Yes,” he said to the elderly couple at the table next to theirs, “hello. How are you? Are you enjoying your meal?”

“Don’t you dare,” Sif warned.

To the restaurant at large, he called, “Would anyone like an autograph from the Avengers’ very own Lady Sif?”

“You snake—” But she cut it off there, as the first to the table was a little girl and her elder brother.

Loki pointed to the corners of his own mouth. “Remember to smile,” he said, demonstrating. “You look twice as threatening when you show your teeth.”

“You’ll pay for this,” she muttered, smiling radiantly.

He settled comfortably in his seat, nodding to each person joining the queue. “I can’t wait,” he said.

The little girl beamed at Sif and Sif said to her, “You are a strong girl, and brave.”

Someone at the window said, “Oh! Look!” The café’s door opened; the bell rang out again. What a pleasure it must be, Loki thought not unfondly as he watched Sif and her suitors, to delight in one’s own face. He waited to feel badly at the thought, but even with the smell of cheap pizza still thick around him, and the press of the crowd gathering, it was burdensome work to begrudge Sif the respect she’d won. Responsibility chafed. Loki finished his water and kept the smile light on his face.

*

Just to prove a point, the next day he went out. He bypassed Manhattan and Earth entirely, and instead he went to a curio shop on the far side of the galaxy. There, at least, he was welcome as Loki. He’d brought the shop’s owner many rare and nasty things over the years, dangerous things for her to keep or trade as she liked. He hadn't particularly cared what she liked, so long as he found something he liked on the shelves.

“Have you a new thing for me?”

Loki left off the shelves and turned. The shop keeper was tall today, willowy and long-fingered, her eyes like concave mirrors. Through the veil she wore in the between realms, Loki caught glimpses of the rest of her: the twining tendrils, the abscesses that bled starlight, the second, great maw biting mindlessly at the air.

“Not today,” he said. “I’ve been occupied with … other considerations.”

She clucked her tongue and her fingers, too. A thick-toothed mouth at the end of her thumb snapped.

“My shelves are not free,” she warned. 

“Nor my services,” he countered. Then as a concession he bowed his head slightly. “But as it so concerns you, I’ll try to keep my eye open.”

“Something exceptional,” she said. She looked across her library, down on the silent rows from the fourth balcony. “Something unlike anything else.” A reflecting eye rolled to stare unblinking at him. In its surface, he was distorted, thinned. “You’ve been absent.”

“Work elsewhere.” He drew his finger down the spine of a promising book and made to slide it out. “My services are always in such high demand.”

“Not of late,” said the shop keeper. “You’ve caused little trouble. Tame.”

Loki shelved the book. The corner of the book bit his palm as he pushed it back in its place.

“Was there something specific you wanted of me?”

“Are you happy?” she asked, curious.

That was certainly the question of his life. When had he ever been truly happy? Mother had called him melancholy when he was young, and she’d drawn him into her lap and dropped kisses on his face till he squirmed free again, laughing. Happiness sat uneasy in his gut.

“Does it matter?” he asked in answer.

The shop keeper did not press. She’d other matters. She shrugged, and the cascade of twining limbs at her back shrugged with her.

“Browse as you like,” she said, and she left him there.

Loki left, too, after another half hour browsing the shelves. Nothing caught at him. Why had he come? To prove a point, he supposed, but to whom and about what he couldn’t say, and none of the books had answers he wanted. He didn't know what questions to ask them. The shop had nothing for him, and now he had nothing for it. He couldn't remember why he'd come and he didn't know what he wanted, and when the shop keeper looked at him with her distorting eyes he had seen a wraith in them, a thin and terrible thing that wore a mockery of his face. He'd seen himself in her eyes as he had felt himself to be only a year and some few months ago.

That was answer enough. Loki left. He didn’t go back.

*

Sif returned smelling of smoke and bloodied earth. She left her chest plate at the door, her glaive at the stand, her shield by her glaive, and Loki bore her back against the wall with her hand fisted in his hair and his tongue at her teeth. When the door opened he had been sitting at his desk by the soft-glowing lamp, reading an old text of magic and puzzling out new meaning from those well-worn lines, and he had looked up to see Sif with her hair loose, caked with filth and thoroughly unappealing, and the thing in his gut turned over.

The chest plate clattered. She ran a hand through her dirtied hair and grimaced. He set a mark on the page, closed the book, and rose from his desk. Sif spotted him. He took three long strides, and she threw her collapsed glaive down. The shield followed. She caught him. Her mouth was hot, her teeth sharp; her tongue rolled against his. His shirt untucked. She slid her hand up the back of it, her nails scraping wrong-ways up his spine. If her hair stank of smoke, her mouth tasted of it. He devoured as much of it as he could, but Sif hungered, too.

“I missed you as well,” she said, biting his lip.

Loki smoothed his hand down the supple swell and dip of her back to the spot low above her hips, and he pressed her to him. Sif’s fingers tightened in his hair. Her teeth came out in full force.

Her leather under armor stayed on. The knot was too tricky for his fingers, and Sif laughed at that, too, throaty and warm so he’d no choice but to stop her mouth again. There was no stopping Sif, though; there never had been. She pulled at his shirt till he drew back long enough to strip out of it, and then she set her hands on him, one hand at his waist to pull his hips hard to hers again, the other at his chest. The scar there was pale, paler than the one she’d earned on her throat. 

He had stood once before the bathroom mirror when Sif was out and slowly, carefully, peeled back the layers of the enchantment first laid on him by Frigga at Odin’s wish, till Loki saw a jötunn standing there. The scar had showed like frost spread across a frozen river, and as he touched it, he found it felt the same as it did when he was the ǫ́ss.

Sif’s fingernails traced the edges of his scar. He curled to kiss the length of her throat, following the trail walking along the curve. She turned; her throat was bared to him. He stayed a moment there. Her thumb swept over his heart.

“The bed,” he said, somehow.

Her knee slipped up his thigh. The hand at his breast worked up to his shoulder; her fingers dug into the joint.

“Here,” she said.

He got her trousers open, the laces chafing his fingers in his haste. Her hand tightened on his shoulder. The joint pained him where her fingers pushed in. Loki dropped to his knees before her, pulling the leather down as he went. The cloth at her waist he merely dragged to the side, and Sif said, “Careless”; then she made a sharp noise, trapped in her teeth. He’d got his thumb down between her folds, damp but not yet slick. His lips followed. He licked once, twice, and flicked the tip of his tongue at her, and she was laughing again, that same throaty thing that made him want to draw her all around him and let the rest of the world fall away.

“Silvertongue,” she said, teasing, so he teased her too.

The scent of her filled him. The taste of her made his tongue slow. With the tip of his tongue he shaped out words, small things only for her. Her right hand found his hair and she petted him, as she might a house cat that had come to sit in her lap. Well, he’d cream enough for any cat, though Sif had the claws. When he brushed his little finger very lightly over her clitoris, the nails of her left hand dug into his shoulder with all the tenacity of any predacious tigress. The hand in his hair moved, sliding over the curve to cradle his head at the back, the better to push him closer.

“Impatient,” he scolded. He gave her the teeth for that.

“You’re the one with the clever tongue,” Sif said. She was gratifyingly husky. Her fingers wound in his hair, and she urged him to her. Slicker, now.

He tongued the small nub, encircling it and humming against, no tune but the simple declaration of her name, just Sif, rising and falling, rising and falling like a children’s song. His thumb pressed at her entrance and then lightly he ran it back up.

She said, “Loki,” and “Don’t be so _soft_ ,” and she scratched her nails along his scalp, sharp enough he jerked, once. She was laughing at him then, so he slowed the stroking of his tongue and slid just one finger in up to the first knuckle.

“What would you like?” he murmured, kissing her clit.

She pulled on his hair. “You know.”

He turned, leaving his kisses now on her thigh. “I’m not going to be the only one using their tongue.” He got the finger in to the second knuckle and, crooking it only just, stroked the once and not again.

“You’ve never listened to me before.”

“I always listen to you.”

“ _Don’t_ take your finger out,” she said sharply.

He hid his smile in her hip. The leather under armor covered her belly and much of her waist. He’d little else to turn his attentions to but the hard, muscled swell of her hip.

“And?”

“Use your tongue.”

Ever obliging, Loki licked the joint beneath his lips. For that joke, she paid him well, twisting his hair so his head ached with it.

“Well, you’ll have to be more precise, my lady.”

“Use it on my cunt or you won’t have a tongue,” said Sif.

He kissed her hip in parting and said to it, “Empty threats. You love my tongue far too much.”

“I love it little when you use it ill,” said Sif.

“Tell me if this suits you, then,” he said, and he took her clit gently between his teeth and closed his lips. He’d learned, after a few embarrassing first tries, that she liked it best when he sucked her, sucked her and traced the contours of that tiny thing with just the tip of his tongue. The finger in her he slid to the root, and he began, slowly, to add another: one knuckle, the second, then the third.

Her hips jerked. She pulled his mouth to her; she pulled him to her. He fucked her steadily with his fingers, flexing them in her and then rubbing. Sif was wet around his fingers, hot and so very slick. She rolled her hips again. Her scent had deepened, that sex smell heavier, and his cock—the arousal had crept up on him from the moment he’d heard her hand at the door and now, as Loki knelt before her and wrote her name with his tongue, it ate at him like fire in his gut—began to ache. He wanted very much to slide a hand down between his legs and drag the want out of him, but her thick thigh was trembling beneath one hand and the fingers, three now, of the other were too deep inside her to even think of pulling out yet, not with Sif’s hand in his hair and her grip agony. He thought of knotting his hand in her hair. He thought of Sif’s hair spilling across his chest.

Her peak came in little waves at first. He urged it on as he hummed Sif, Sif, Sif, high and then low and then high again. She said, “Yes. Again. Don’t you dare stop singing,” so he said it again and again, her name and only her name on his tongue and in his mouth and on the tips of the fingers he worked in her. He curled his fingers and then—as her thigh tensed beneath his hand—he lowered his mouth to the place where his fingers entered Sif and he licked her there.

“Loki,” she said, and her hand slid down to cup his nape, and the way she petted him there at the end was nearly tender. 

Another touch for the house cat, but it was Sif who purred with three fingers spread wide and crooked inside her and his tongue circling the lot. He said this to her as he came sliding up her as she came sliding down, and Sif hit his shoulder nearly hard enough to bruise even with her legs still quivering around him.

Loki laughed into her mouth and she licked at his lips, tasting her self there and swallowing all his laughter till he’d only little gasps left, awful little gasps that stuck in his chest. His heart was running too quickly. Her hair shone all around her, like a dark halo, and her face was red and her eyes nearly as dark as her hair. He had her in his mouth still and yet, suddenly, she was unreal to him.

She was wet against him, her mouth wet, her inner thighs wet, all of her slick and pressed against Loki, Loki who—it was very, calmly clear to him—did not belong here, now, before her or beneath her. Her hands fell between them. He felt her fumbling at his trousers, buttoned and zipped in the Midgardian fashion rather than laced. His thumb fluttered at her jaw. He could not blink, for fear he would lose sight of her. He knew precisely how many eyelashes she’d woken with in the morning because he had woken before her and fallen prey to sentimentality as she drooled into her pillow, and he was very certain if she did not have the same number of eyelashes now, in this moment, as she bit his lip, that something would have changed between them.

“Loki—”

He kissed her savagely; he forced his eyes to close. He didn’t want to count her eyelashes. He didn’t want to know.

Sif said, “I’m here, idiot,” to his teeth, and then she snapped at his tongue so it bled. She was the one who pushed him down to the floor at the end. Her long and work-hardened fingers were a moment at his cock. The scrape of her fingernail there got his own eyelashes up. He saw her through them, as through a cloud, and it was worry that hardened her mouth; it was something else that illuminated her steady gaze. Sif guided him between her legs and sank down on him in a single, business-like roll. He dug his fingers into her hips, demanding stillness. The way she looked at him was punishment enough.

She’d never liked taking orders, not from Loki. Sif fucked him there on the floor, and not once did she looked away from him; not once did she release him from the weight and heat and command of her regard. Her teeth flashed against her lip. The blackness of her hair swayed over her shoulder, and he wound his hand in it; he laced his fingers through it; he tugged once at it so that Sif’s back arched and her throat curved and her head went back. And still she would not leave him be, her eyes on him with her black lashes down.

The floor was brutally unforgiving against his back, and he knew in an hour’s time he would regret it, but he thought perhaps he wouldn’t after all. A terrible heat burned in him, low in him but in his chest too, some tight and ugly and desperate, wanting thing that drove him to buck into her, as hard in turn as Sif. She still had her leather under armor on; he still had his trousers at his knees. Her hair, pulled so tightly about his hand, drew lines on his fingers. Sif was breaking him.

She bent, fluidly. Her lips were soft on his jaw. The suggestion of teeth made his eyelids shiver.

“I won’t break you,” she said. Her teeth came out. She bit his jaw nearly as sharply as she’d bit his tongue; then she kissed that spot again, just as softly as before.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You did.” She dragged her teeth down to his throat. The rhythm between them was guttering, ragged. “You’re always saying these things to me.”

His breath was short in his throat. Her hair was long in his hand. He could not look away from Sif. He could not bear to do it. She was the weight at the heart of it all, the stone to hold it down.

“I could never—” He licked his lips, and Sif was there, biting again. He forgot what he was going to say.

“What? What’s this thing Loki Silvertongue could never?”

“You ask so _much_ of me,” he snapped suddenly.

She kissed him again, long now and slow, her tongue working at his teeth. He tasted blood, his own blood, in his mouth, and Sif was fucking him into the floor, her nails in his chest beneath his shirt so he bled there too; and he wanted her to keep going, not to stop, to break him if that was what she wanted of him.

“That isn’t what I want of you,” she said fiercely.

It tore out of him: “Then _what_?” His lungs burned with it. All of him burned.

“Loki,” she said.

“Tell me—”

“Loki,” said Sif again.

When he came, he was staring fixed and unblinking at her. He was watching her face with his fist still bound in her hair. She watched him, too, as he broke at last beneath her. The world was still there at the end of it. Sif was still there. Very gently—very firmly—she kissed first his right cheek, beneath the eye, and his left cheek, and said, “You must trust me, Loki.”

He closed his eyes.

*

In that golden-bright room on Asgard, Sif had spoken to him, her voice rough with sleep and more. The moon was still bright beneath her skin, but thick shadows blacked her eyes.

“You would have died.”

He’d turned his face from her intensity.

“I thought I was in exile,” he said to the far wall.

“You were,” said Sif, “’til you took a hole in the chest for me. It was the only way to save you.”

Her fingers, callused and strong, embraced his hand. He felt her other hand come to cup his shoulder and then, tentatively, she brushed her fingertips across his cheek.

“I set them against you,” Loki said.

It came out of him, weaker than he’d wanted it to come out. His chest was whole now but oh, how it ached. The beating of his own heart was a dagger shoved between his ribs again and again. He deserved that, he supposed.

“I know,” said Sif.

He looked at her. The Asgard sun was in her hair. She gleamed.

“That’s twice now I’ve nearly killed you,” he said. “You should have let me die.”

“Would you have let me?” she asked him.

They both knew the answer to that now.

“Asgard won’t have me,” he said instead.

It was all he had left, then. Sif had sworn her shield and arms to Asgard, as had Loki, but unlike Loki she would never break an oath. She was honorable. He lived because she was honorable. Her honor was why when they’d been young and she had turned to him under a weeping tree and reached for him, he had stepped away. Sif was not meant for Loki. He was not meant for her.

She touched his face again. He didn’t move away; he wasn’t certain he could. Her throat wasn’t bandaged; the cut had healed, but the skin was still red, fiercely so. He remembered the blood spilling down her chest plate. His own chest throbbed. He wondered if it would ever stop hurting, and if it did, would he be happy for it?

“I would,” said Sif.

He did not breathe. The wholeness of his chest was a fire, set in him.

Again she said, “I would have you.”

*

He spread his fingers across her shoulder and pressed his palm flat over the shoulder blade. All down the crease of her spine, that shallow line running down her back between the lean muscle built around it, he left careful kisses. His lips were cool, each touch perfunctory but for the pressure of his hand on her back and the fingers working through her hair.

“You’re obsessed.” She mumbled it into her pillow.

“With you?”

He mouthed an old scar left of her spine, nearly faded away into her skin after centuries. The troll’s blade had gouged an impressive piece out of her back but missed the spinal cord. At the time it had seemed rather frightening: he recalled, with the calmness only time could give such a memory, the blood soaking into her trousers and the curious, swooping feeling in his chest when he’d tried to put pressure on the wound and his thumb had slipped inside it. Now not even a dip remained, only a patch of slightly darker skin. He traced the shape of it with his thumb.

She didn’t notice, or she didn’t care. 

“With my hair. Even when we were children.”

Loki considered the hair wound around and about this finger and then that, as he stroked the back of his other hand against her nape.

“We’ve watched each other grow.”

He heard her smile, hidden somewhere in her mouth. “If you only wanted my hair, you could have it.”

“I wouldn’t want to deprive you of it.” He sighed into the small of her back. “Besides, I’ve grown fond of the noisy parts attached to it.”

He should have known she wouldn’t stay still for him for too long. He leaned out of the way of her elbows—devastating, he well knew, when taken to the face—as Sif rolled over. Her hair tugged at his hand, and he unwound his fingers from it, leaving them weakly curled at her ear. Their knees collided and then she wormed her thigh up between his legs. He was soft against her, but if she pushed, he might find some steel.

“The noisy parts,” she grumbled in her husky, early morning voice. “Is that fit talk for the woman in your bed?”

Loki glossed his finger down the side of her nose. “Your bed.”

“Our bed.”

Sleep dragged at her eyelids. Her knee was bent between his thighs, her toes warm against the back of his calf. She wriggled them and then she wriggled closer. An exquisitely little finger of heat coiled in his chest. She didn’t reach for him or murmur his name in that tantalizing and coarse way she had before she was ready to really wake. Content to stay there as they were, he brushed her nose again and then kissed the tip of it.

“Your bed,” he said again, though the distinction was largely useless.

Sif raised her arm languorously, with all the grace of a swan lifting her head from cool, still waters and the same strength that waterfowl claimed in its ill temper. She didn’t peck at him with her hand though, but let it fall over him. A faint, sour smell of sweat clung to her. Loki kissed her earlobe and then the soft skin behind that.

“It’s our bed now,” Sif said. “You’re in it, too. And don’t you think to tell me I can’t share my bed as I like.”

“I would never.”

The nearness of her, the boneless drape of her arm: he wasn’t aroused, he thought, but he was still breathless. How strange that intimacy alone could do such a thing. He covered the mole on her cheek with his thumb.

Sif said, “You would.”

“I’m much too afraid to cross you,” he said with sly timidity.

Her laughing smile flickered, and blindly, her eyes now shut, she leaned to kiss him. She caught his chin rather than his mouth, but he didn’t terribly mind the dryness or the kindness of her kiss there.

“You’ve never been afraid to cross anyone.”

“My lady tells my lies for me now.”

“Not your lady,” Sif said comfortably. “I’m no one’s lady.

It wasn’t an insult. He knew that. He turned his finger in her hair, spooling it around the first knuckle.

“You are very much a lady,” said Loki. “Too much of a lady to share a bed with me.”

The smile came to her mouth again, sharper now.

“So much for ‘never.’ All your good intentions wasted.”

“Not all of them,” said Loki.

He settled beneath her arm. Her fingers were loose at his back.

“They don’t all remember you,” she said lowly to him. “Some of them were still children when you came to Midgard. The Human Torch wouldn’t even know your name if I hadn’t given it to him.”

“Then why give him my name?”

“You share my bed,” said Sif, “and he is my friend. I share such things with him."

“The heroics fit you better than they do me,” said Loki. He rubbed his thumb across the length of silky hair he’d spun around his first finger. “I’ll leave them to you, if you’ll leave the bed to me.”

“There’s room for you in both places,” said Sif.

Trying for a laugh, he said, “You’d grow tired of me.”

Her embrace tightened. He felt the slide of her toes up the back of his calf. He felt, too, the answering slide in his gut, though he was happy to let it be for the time. Just to carry the smell of her sweat on his skin was enough.

“I would never grow tired of you,” Sif told him, and when she leaned forward again to kiss him, she got the corner of his mouth. He turned to give her what she wanted of him, what he wanted to give her.

*

High in Asgard’s highest tower, that was where the kings and queens of old were remembered. Loki went quietly, unseen by any eyes, even those of all-seeing Heimdall, to that lofty hall in the late afternoon. His footsteps were mute; he crossed the polished floor easily.

Frigga stood at Odin’s hand. He’d only come for one of them. Carved from the rare rainbow stone deep in the Hollow Mountain and then blessed with nine enchantments, each statue was meant to look as much like the living as any magic thing could.

Loki looked up at Frigga on her pedestal. Her eyes were clear. She smiled not at Loki, but at the great and airy window behind him.

“Do you remember my tiger?” he asked her. 

He’d thought of it often of late. Mostly he thought of how easily it had popped in his hands and how nothing he had tried could put it together again. If he was allowed happiness, if he was even capable of happiness, he didn’t know. He had known himself so well, then not at all. The question was in him, the want to ask her, _how do I fix it when I’ve broken it_ , but the ghost before him had no words to give him, no kisses to cure his melancholy.

“I’ve resolved to change,” he said instead. It was more than he’d said to anyone else. If he could change, he wasn’t sure where to start. Too many years now spent vexing others, causing trouble for no reason other than to give him a distraction from the widening emptiness in his chest. He kept that to himself and went on: “To make amends for misdeeds done. But you’ve always known me best. Easier begun than finished. Old habits win out more often than not.” He smiled. “You should see how Thor’s done.”

The enchanter had got the color of her eyes right, the shape of them too, but whoever had done the spell hadn’t known to make her gaze sharp, to give the far corner of her brow a slight arch. They’d taken her sword, too, and her loom. Here in the hall of the dead kings, she was only Odin’s wife, when she had been queen. The old guilt was in him; Loki carried it everywhere. He should have been there.

“For what it’s worth,” Loki said, “I am truly sorry. Mother.”

He imagined she looked at him then and smiled at him as if he were a boy, a very silly boy who’d come to her with a popped tiger in his hands, and what she said to him was “Wash your hands and your face. Tears won’t fix it. Clean up, and then we can try again.”

Loki brushed the hem of her skirt. Stone, and only stone. Some things no one could change. 

He stayed until the sun went out and the coming night swallowed it all.

*

Thor found Loki in the small cove at the far end of the bay, near to the system of old caves they’d explored as children. Loki was skipping rocks over the water by the light of the twin moons and listening to the summer wind singing through the low hills. Thor’s boots scuffed on the gravel.

“Heimdall sent you?” Loki asked without turning. He’d dropped the masking spell once he’d finished picking his way to the beach.

“I thought you wanted to see me,” said Thor. He sat beside Loki on the rocky beach.

“Your cloak will get wet if you sit on it.”

Thor shrugged. “Let it get wet. It’s only a cloak.”

Loki flicked another flat stone across the waves. It hopped four times and then slid softly into the water. As he tossed it, he turned the movement into a gesture to the observatory at the mouth of the world.

“Does he still hold it against me?”

“That you stole his sister away?” asked Thor.

“I didn’t steal Sif,” said Loki, though at times he wondered. At times, he doubted. A liar saw lies all around him.

Thor held his hand out and Loki dropped three stones on to Thor’s wide palm. Reflectively, as he readied to throw, Thor said, “No. Even you’d have trouble stealing Sif.” Thor’s first toss ended badly: the rock fell into the water straight away.

“Bad luck,” said Loki.

“Don’t try to comfort me,” said Thor without heat, “cheater.”

“I’ve never cheated at skipping stones.”

“You’ve always cheated at skipping stones.”

“Not always,” said Loki.

“Always,” said Thor wisely, “is not the same as never.”

“Your queen’s been working on you.”

Thor laughed in the dark and scooped up more rocks from the ground to weigh in his hand. They were quiet together for a while, and for a moment it was even comfortable listening to the water rush up against the sand and then seep away again, or to Thor’s rocks _plunk_ ing as he only tossed them out. Loki watched the moons shivering in the water, the ripples coursing silently out from each sinking rock.

“Why does she stay?” he asked.

“Out of love,” said Thor.

Now Loki laughed. The sound of it made him turn his face away, to the shadows. How needy.

“It _is_ love,” Thor said gruffly. “You misuse her if you think otherwise. We all love you.”

“Even Heimdall?”

“Heimdall abstains.”

“Heimdall,” said Loki, “wants my head on a platter.”

Even Thor would not dispute this. Loki’s sins were not easily discarded. Thor said, “The Bifröst is Heimdall’s charge,” and he was kind enough to leave it at that.

Loki reflected on this. He curled his fingers in the damp, warm sand, digging out furrows and peeling up pebbles to roll between his knuckles. Grit got under his fingernails. Likely he’d find them scratched under a brighter light than the moons afforded. He slung the handful of little stones out over the bay, a meteor shower from his hand.

“Do you think he’d forgive me if I apologized?”

“No,” said Thor.

“Do you think Sif has forgiven me?” Loki asked Thor.

“Ask her that,” said Thor, and he threw one last rock. It skipped twice before sinking. He clapped his hands together, beating the grit off them, but he made no move to stand, content seemingly to sit on the beach beside the brother who once tried to kill him or drive him to kill Loki. Twelve years for a human was a goodly portion of their life and only a breath to an óss or a jötunn, yet still at times Loki found he could little explain or even understand what he had wanted then, to burn the world-tree down or see himself burned on it. He wondered if he was depressed and didn’t know how to say this to Thor. He wasn’t sure how to say it to anyone who wasn’t dead.

“I went to see Mother,” Loki said.

Thor looked at him. There were no shadows in his brother’s face, no darkness in his eyes.

“I’m glad,” he said. “Mother missed you.”

Loki smiled, joyless. Thor had never been subtle. They both of them knew what he meant, that Frigga hadn’t forgotten Loki in his absence, as he’d plotted to consume Midgard and make it his own. She’d asked him once, as he sat in that cell in Asgard’s dungeons, why he’d done it, and Loki had laughed and said, “Why does it matter? You have the prince you want in Thor.”

A cross wind from high in the hills battered the waves. The water trembled; it slithered across the sand like a snake. Carefully, Loki said, “I don’t know that I deserve to be happy.”

For a time, a very long time, Thor was quiet, and Loki thought, as he had thought when he’d laughed in his mother’s face, that he should have held his tongue. Then Thor stirred and his huge hand rested on Loki’s arm. His brother shook him once by the shoulder.

“I want you to be happy,” said Thor, his voice low. “I am your brother.”

A world of meaning sat in that: not _you are my brother_ , but _I am your brother_. The first was the burden; the latter was love, however sorely tested.

“As I am yours,” said Loki.

Thor smiled at him again. It wasn’t how he would have smiled at Loki when they were children, before the chasm between them began to open, but it was there.

“Ask Sif what you want to know from her,” he said again, and then he let Loki go.

*

A cloud of grit and dirt obscured the crater. Loki stepped through the haze, down the jagged lip to where Sif was swearing. Her hair had come loose, and her glaive, knocked from her hand as she’d flown through the air, had lanced through and stuck in the sidewalk some eight feet left of her. Loki revised his opinion of the doctor Doom’s strength. Sif brushed asphalt from her shoulders and kicked her feet free of rubble. His shadow fell over her, and Sif’s head came up.

“My lady,” Loki said, and he knelt to offer her his hand, his arm rested on his thigh.

Her eyebrows met her helm. “What are you doing here?”

Her hand fit his neatly and she leveraged herself upright. Sif’s shadow stretched out behind her, and his was a dark pool at her feet.

“I was passing through,” he said as he stood, “and I thought I might see how your day was going.”

An explosion interrupted. A plume of smoke rose from a battered car, and that Captain America fellow struggled free of the metal wreckage. Sif’s regard fell hotly on Loki’s throat.

“It still fits?”

He glanced down at his chest, at the light, padded armor and the green cloth cut to frame it. Brushing at his chest, more to show off the dark splinted vambrace and how nicely it fit to his arm than anything else, he said, “Well, I’ve hardly gone soft.”

Sif’s smile curled as her black hair curled. The air was thick with smoke and grit, and overhead a person in powered armor rocketed past them. The laughter in Sif’s face, and the fondness in that laughter, had caught Loki as readily as a mesmer’s sweetest mirage.

“You fooled me well,” she said archly. Her hand was at his shoulder. He felt it as a weight through his shoulder guards, and he felt it, too, as he had the night before when she’d slid her hand over his shoulder and pulled him hard against her when he would have gone slowly.

“Oh, I’ve never fooled you,” he said.

She turned from him then, but he saw how her eyes flicked back to him, how her lashes dipped and then rose again. 

“The green suits you.”

He followed her across the crater to the buckled sidewalk, where Sif yanked her glaive free from the brittle concrete.

“Flattery,” he said, “will get you anywhere you like.”

Some bright thing—a column of fire—flared in the corner of his sight, and Loki turned, ice at his hands; but Sif said, “Storm!” and her hand on Loki’s shoulder pushed, commanding him to ease.

The fire landed with incongruous delicacy in the crater at Sif’s other side, and Loki saw then how it was a man, a young man with dark skin and an easy smile who burned as a torch. The wind ate at the flames engulfing him; the fire turned, twisting in on itself. This, then, was the vaunted Human Torch, new to the Avengers’ roster.

“Who’s this guy?” he asked Sif, gesturing to Loki.

His shoulders tensed. He readied for it. But Sif’s hand on his shoulder smoothed down to cup his arm, with a tenderness that stilled him.

“He is Loki,” said Sif, “my cup-bearer.”

“Ohhhh,” said the Human Torch. “I got you. Boyfriend, huh.” He sighed, lovelorn and dramatic. “I guess that means the date’s off.”

“You are a brave companion,” Sif told the Human Torch, “but several centuries too young for me.”

The Human Torch shrugged, fire roiling off his shoulders. “Worth a shot, right? Nice to meet you,” he said to Loki. “I’d shake your hand, but you know.” He smiled; his teeth radiated firelight. “You guys want to get in on this?”

He didn’t wait for an answer but took one long, loping step forward and then he was airborne, a streak of glimmering red and orange punching through the blue of the sky.

Loki watched him go. He hadn’t expected any one would welcome him. He had, in fact, prepared extensively for scorn, and he’d done so knowing it would be well-deserved, that he would have to hold his tongue to keep the promise he’d made unspoken to his mother’s statue.

Sif squeezed Loki’s arm. Her grip was strong, and her gaze warmed as the Torch’s fires did not.

“Come,” she said lightly, swinging her glaive up to her shoulder, “or there will be nothing left for us.”

*

The sun set, as it did every night. Sif sat cross-legged on the floor with an oiled cloth and her chest plate in hand, and her back to the bank of windows that looked out at the sea. Day had already faded from the horizon there, as it did early in the afternoon in the winter months, so she worked assiduously to clean the metal not by sunlight but by the lamp by the bed.

Loki turned a page in his book. The paper was worn thin with age and yellowed, too. He read three words and then he set it down in his lap with his thumb to mark the page. Sif’s sleeveless shirt was loose around her chest, and the musculature in her arms tightened and eased with each stroke.

“Why did you forgive me?” he asked.

She looked briefly to him. “Who says I have?”

“A serious answer, Sif.”

Her elbow flexed. She put force into cleaning off a spot in the armor. Setting aside the needs of tending to the metal, she was forever wanting to shine when she rode into battle, to draw eyes to her as in defiance: look at me, I’m here. He’d tried once to reason with her, but she’d said only that she had no desire to hide in the shadows. 

“You would have died for me,” she said. She said it very calmly, but Loki, who’d made a game of mapping Sif’s moods when they were young, saw the fluttering along her jaw.

“The only reason you were ever in danger that day is because I put you there.”

Sif set the chest plate aside. She left the glaive where it was and went, instead, to kneel beside Loki where he sat at his desk, so that she looked only a few inches up into his face. It was Loki, though, who felt as if he were at her feet again, a shadow there cast across her as she shone.

“I chose to be there,” she said, and this was true.

He watched her; without blinking he watched her, and he knew if he said he did not deserve her Sif would lambast him for a fool—Sif took what she wanted and nothing less—and yet he could not believe there was anything within him good enough still that could justify why someone as honorable and as brave as Sif would wish to kneel beside him. He watched her, and he thought of shadows, and he tried to find distance in his chest so he might say what he meant to say next.

He said, “You should have let me die,” as he’d said to her once before.

“Stop this,” said Sif. She searched his face. “You are not the same man you were once.”

“You would have struck me down yourself.”

“I would have,” she said, “if you had betrayed Asgard.”

“And I did,” he said. “You all know what I did to Odin.”

A shadow moved across her face, Sif who showed like the full moon. Had she forgiven him? He thought perhaps it wasn’t something that could be forgiven.

She covered his hand with her own. The pages of the book made soft noise, like reeds moving with the wind. Her palm was warm, her fingers rough. He knew her hand well. His throat hurt to know it.

“I choose to be here,” said Sif.

He asked her, “Why?”

“We were children once together,” Sif said to him. “You used to tease me for my hair, and I would chase you around the gardens till I caught you.”

“I remember,” he said quietly. “You would beat me.”

She smiled at the memory. “And you would laugh.”

He laid his other hand on top of hers, so that her swordsman’s hand was between his scholar’s hands.

“I’m not that boy either,” he said. “I haven’t been for many years.”

“And I am not that girl,” said Sif, looking up at him as he looked down to her. “She loved you and could not say it.”

The lamp’s muted light caught on her throat; it illuminated the scar lingering there in her skin. A tightness in his chest was unwinding, slowly at first and then quicker like a spool of thread thrown down the stairs, the end of the line pinched between Sif’s fingers.

“And now?” he asked.

“I would catch you,” said Sif, “and I would say it.”

He stroked her wrist; he cupped her hand tightly; he bent his head to kiss the back of her hand.

“Now if you don’t mind,” she said, “I still have work to do,” but she stayed a moment at his side. Her nose wrinkled. She eyed him, and the suggestion of a laugh played on her slowly curling mouth.

“What are you so happy about?”

“Nothing,” said Loki, and he kissed her hand again, that callused, warm hand she'd offered him. “Please. Don't let me distract you.”

"You always distract me," Sif rebutted.

"I suppose," said Loki slowly, "you'll have to learn to live with that," and she didn't argue—though she lifted her eyes to the ceiling as if for patience—but then rose and kissed his brow and went back to her cloth and her blemished armor.

Only later, after Loki had taken his reading to bed and Sif had hung her armor and her glaive on their stands, and after she’d followed him to bed and he’d set the book aside, and after she’d blown out the light so all in the room was night, only then did he ask her.

“Are you happy?”

Midgard’s one moon was but a sliver that night. Sif’s face was dark, hidden from him by the smallness of the moonlight. He traced her cheekbone with his finger.

“If I weren’t,” she said, “do you think I would be here?”

“If Asgard needed it of you,” he said.

She caught his hand, and she slid her own down to cradle his wrist with some tenderness he hadn’t expected.

“I’m not here because Asgard needs me to be here.” She turned sharp then, even as her fingers remained still and gentle along his arm. “And if you think that I would lie with you to keep you in line…”

“Not Sif Shield-maiden,” said Loki, then, lower, he corrected: “Not-maiden. You have to understand, it’s difficult for me to see how it is you could choose to be here with me, tonight and tomorrow night and so on.”

“Do you need me to say it again? I chose to be here. I chose to be with you,” said Sif, “and I choose it still. Do you believe me when I tell you?”

He slipped his hand from grip, only so he could fold his fingers between her fingers, his palm to her palm. He looked for their hands joined in the dark, but this place of connection was only a shadow within a shadow.

“You never lie,” he said.

“But do you believe me?”

He said, “Yes,” and Sif wiggled closer, close enough to kiss his jaw. Loki turned so that her kiss fell next on his lips.

He murmured, “But you might have to remind me. Only until I can remember for myself.”

He felt her smile on his lower lip, trapped in her kiss.

“I swear it,” said Sif, who had never broken an oath made. “If you promise to stop hiding.”

Her hand was coarse, her fingers as rough. He caressed the side of her hand with his thumb. Sif’s friend, her shield-brother the Torch, had smiled at Loki; he doubted he’d receive so warm a welcome from others among the Avengers. Well, he thought, he’d always enjoyed a challenge.

Little flashes of light showed beyond the window: it was beginning, again, to snow.

“Since you insist,” said Loki.

Sif framed his face in her hands and bent over him, her hair a black cloud pushing out the rest of the world ‘til only Loki and only Sif remained. Outside the snow continued falling. In the morning, the streets were thick with it, and Loki, Sif curled against his back, looked at the window and the web of frost coating it. Sif's arm was around his waist. Her fingertips curled beneath his side, her thumb at the bottom rib. He thought he must be happy. He thought he didn't mind that much at all.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from the song "Easy" by Joanna Newsom.
> 
> Johnny Storm here is played by Michael B. Jordan, a popular rumored casting choice for the forthcoming Fantastic Four reboot (and my preferred choice for the Torch).
> 
> Thank you very much for reading! I hope you enjoyed it. :)


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